UNKNOWN, 1918

UNKNOWN, 1918

MY DEAR BROTHER, — The question raised by your reading of Leviticus 7 is interesting and important, and the contrast suggested by John 6 contains much that is instructive.

It seems to me that eating the offerings is with a view to the reproduction of what is eaten; it becomes characteristic of the person who eats, it forms him spiritually. The fat and the blood were never to be eaten because what they speak of is peculiar to Christ; the saints will never take character from Christ in that which is set forth in these two things. There is that in the Person of Christ which is exclusively for the Father’s delight, that which is inscrutable to human eye, a richness and perfection which God only can appropriate. That is the fat. Then the blood is given “upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul. Therefore have I said unto the children of Israel, No soul of you shall eat blood”, Leviticus 17: 11, 12. Christ is absolutely alone in making atonement; it is a character in which saints do not participate at all. This is obvious. We can neither be what He was, nor do what He did in the way of atonement, and this is emphasised in the prohibition of eating the fat and the blood.

But when we come to John 6 we are on an entirely different line. It is not atonement that is in view. “The bread of God is he who comes down out of heaven, and gives life to the world”, verse 33. It is a question of life according to divine ^[p. 78] purpose being given to men, and in order to reach it there must be the appropriation of Christ as the One whose flesh has been given for the life of the world. We have to learn that on the natural line we have no life in ourselves. Eating of the loaves might sustain natural life for a time, but all that order of things is under death. We have to come into a spiritual order of things to know anything really of life, and we only pass from the natural to the spiritual by appropriating Christ as giving His flesh for the life of the world. The love of God has opened up to us a way out, but it is by eating the flesh of the Son of man and drinking His blood. The fact that He has come into death for us shows the impossibility of connecting life with what we are naturally, but it is the blessed manifestation of divine love “come down” (words specially characteristic of this chapter) to the lowest point that in the appropriation of it we might live spiritually. We appropriate that which has come from far above us, but which has placed itself within our reach in the only spot where it could be truly food and drink for us — even in death. We do not drink the blood in its atoning character — that is exclusively for God, meeting His holy glory in every way as to sin — but we drink it as the blessed witness of divine love that would come down into death so that there might be a way out for us from everything that we were naturally, and that we might appropriate the flesh and blood of the Son of man as the manifestation of a love which we could have known in no other way. It is our way into life spiritually in the blessed knowledge of what has come down.

I trust these few remarks may help. John 6 is a very wonderful part of Scripture, and one is thankful for every occasion of meditating upon it.
1918.